I just wrote this on the fRoots board but hope it bears repeating here:

The first folk club that I was persuaded by friends to go to was in Weston-super-Mare. I was sixteen, the guests were the Yetis, the audience featured little old ladies knitting (they were probably in their 30s, but when you're 16 . . .) and I thought it was a horrible practical joke that had been played on me. It was a year before I tried another one, the Ballads & Blues in Bristol: the guest was Tom Paley and the main resident was Fred Wedlock, and from then on I was converted. You could say that Fred Wedlock helped change my life.

Fred was a fixture on the Bristol folk scene then, immensely popular but steadfastly refusing to give up his day job. His light, personable mixture of funny songs, traditional songs and chorus jokes seemed almost throwaway but actually highly skilled. He was very supportive of all the myriad other types of musicians popping up on the burgeoning local scene (see the recent Bristol Folk book): my first ever paid gig was part of a triple bill organised by Fred at a local teacher training college - the other two were Keith Christmas and Sally Oldfield and I think for all of us it was our first proper booking beyond club floor spots. So he helped change my life twice.

It was only after we persuaded a somewhat reluctant Fred - he didn't think there'd be much demand - to record his debut album The Folker for Village Thing and it went on to sell over 20,000 that he decided to go full time. The title track, a parody of Paul Simon's The Boxer became a national folk club standard, performed and recorded by many. In that big boom of folk club "entertainers" of the 70s from which emerged Jasper Carrott and numerous others, Fred was the one I liked the most because his song-to-joke balance was the highest. A while later he had his Top 10 hit The Oldest Swinger In Town.

I last saw Fred some five years back when there were a couple of Bristol Troubadour re-union concerts. For some reason I still have total recall on some of his epics, and remember reciting his talking blues that began "I was driving down the old M4, doing a ton or maybe some more . . . " to my pal Ben who had come along for the ride down said motorway. Ben later got the full on Bristolese experience after I persuaded Fred to sing his celebrated version of Adge Cutler's Thees Got'n Whur Thee Casn't Back'n Asn't?. Now that's what I call regional folk music . . .

This sad news of Fred's death today came as I was about to invite him to appear at the Village Thing 40th anniversary gig coming up at Cecil Sharp House in September. I wondered if he'd ever played at CSH. As a true English folk (club) hero, he certainly should have done.